You may not think of your employees’ phones as business devices, but when employees use their mobile devices on behalf of the business, they expect the business to provide support for that use.

The kinds of issues employees need help with include:

• logging into the company network

• accessing their email

• using mobile applications

• setting up Wi-Fi or VPN connections

• printing

From the business’s perspective, providing support is difficult because of the wide variety of mobile devices and the many different versions of mobile operating systems they run. Support is also complicated because there are many potential failure points, including the network, application issues, the operating system, and user preferences settings. It isn’t realistic for businesses to avoid providing support, however, and in one aspect, support from the business is critical: security.

Aspects of Mobile Device Support

Mobile devices introduce a number of new information security threats businesses need to defend against, such as the loss of corporate data when the physical device is lost. Companies need to support their employees in using safe computing practices even on non-corporate mobile devices in order to protect the business. This includes enforcing measures such as encryption and antivirus software, along with 2-factor authentication when logging into corporate systems from a mobile device.

Because security is closely coupled with user management, it’s important to have a formal provisioning process that grants users access to corporate resources from their devices. Businesses can also require users to be on the latest supported version of their operating system, which minimizes the number of device and operating system combinations you need to support.

Providing users support for the business applications they use on mobile devices is simplified if you require users to download their apps from a company app store. That way you can be sure they have a legitimate copy of the app that isn’t contaminated with malware as well as make sure it’s a version you’re able to support.

You can use enterprise mobility management software (EMM) or mobile device management (MDM) software to establish policies that ensure users connect only using devices running operating systems and applications you want to allow and support.

Providing Mobile Support

Your help desk should have the necessary skills to help users with basic mobile device questions, including provisioning, connecting to the corporate network, and business-related mobile apps. If your help desk lacks this capability, consider using help desk services from Prescient Solutions. Whether you use an on site help desk or virtual help desk, our experts will help users resolve their mobile problems. More extensive mobile support services implement the EMM or MDM tools needed to manage users devices to allow safe connectivity to the business. Contact Prescient Solutions to learn more about how you can help your employees effectively and safely use their mobile devices for business.